For an ice maker, it doesn’t get much better. Cliff McCaig was walking back and forth across the outdoor rink, dragging his homemade Zamboni behind him, when a crowd started gathering. He was new at this, a little self-conscious knowing his machine was unorthodox, but he could tell he was on to something when he looked behind him and saw the ice shiny and steaming, the hot water he was laying down quickly crystallizing. That’s when the hockey game on an adjacent rink stopped and the teenage players crowded around to peer over the end boards through the chain-link fence. Hey mister, the teenagers hollered at him. Can you do our rink, too?

McCaig laughs a big incredulous laugh when recounting this day last winter, one of the first times he had tried out his DIY ice-resurfacing machine on the pleasure rink at the Triwood Community Hall. He laughs a lot while talking about his creation, as do most who see it: a spare-parts contraption that is both ingenious and absurd. The idea came to him after he started taking his hockey-obsessed six-year-old son skating here. He thought he’d pitch in on days off from his job as a Calgary firefighter to help maintain the ice, thereby becoming one of the unheralded and unpaid heroes who keep the city’s rinks clear and smooth every year. But old-fashioned flooding with a hose wasn’t good enough for him.

The way McCaig tells it, his “Zamboni” (let’s get real, everybody calls it a Zamboni, no matter the brand or build) popped into his mind, a vision fully formed. A little Googling honed the idea, scrounging turned up some parts and a few days of battling the cold in his uninsulated garage led to his creation: a red wagon leftover from his childhood flyer route, an old barbecue burner and propane tank to warm water in a steel drum once used to flatten fresh sod, et voilà—the Canadian dream, a small, hand-pulled version of the machines that keep indoor ice smooth all over the world.

Beyond glossy ice, however, there’s something more to McCaig’s Zamboni and the countless others like it around the city (well, nothing else is quite like his, but you know what I mean). From the backyard sheets kept smooth by jury-rigged garbage pails dragging rags, to the brand-name behemoths that maintain some of the city’s more luxurious community outdoor rinks, look around and you’ll quickly see that these contraptions are grooming more than just ice.

They look different today, but the Zamboni has seen few fundamental changes since an American refrigeration technician kitted out an army-surplus truck with a blade and created the first ice-resurfacing machine in 1949. Worried the popularity of refrigerators would kill his ice-block-making business, Frank Zamboni hit upon the idea of a machine that would quicken the process of resurfacing the local skating rink in Paramount, Calif. It wouldn’t be long before the entire world would be ignoring his pleas to call the machine what it is, rather than by his name.

Before Zamboni, resurfacing took several workers more than an hour. A scraper was dragged over the ice to level it, and the shavings were shovelled off by hand. Then, the ice was flooded using hoses and allowed to freeze. This is the same process you still see countless Canadians use every day in winter to maintain outdoor rinks, with the scraping typically being done by weary skaters unlucky enough to have shovels thrust into their hands after a day of shinny. It’s labour-intensive, but it works. Just not well enough for everyone.

Any pond-hockey connoisseur can tell the difference between a rink bludgeoned into shape by a hose and one caressed to a sheen by a Zamboni. It’s the difference between KFC and foie gras; one acned with droplets and swells, the other polished and crisp. So for those volunteers committed enough to spend the wee hours of the dark winter making ice, Zamboni ice becomes an aspiration. It’s the white whale of ice making.

For most of those volunteer Ahabs, however, the dream comes without a budget. Zambonis, even Canadian-made Olympia knock-offs, can reach six figures, far beyond what most communities can afford. What amateur ice makers lack in money, however, they make up for in ingenuity and passion.

Fifteen years ago, a volunteer in the southwest community of Strathcona, whose identity has been lost in the mists of time, strapped a plastic barrel to a utility wagon. With a few metres of plastic piping, a drill and a little plumbing know-how, he rigged up a contraption that, when a valve was pulled, sent water out the back and through a pipe perforated with small holes that allowed the water to spill onto the ice. A piece of carpet laid down behind (eventually, somebody managed to acquire discarded fabric from a real Zamboni) spread the water out evenly across the ice to freeze in the winter air. It worked so well that a replica was built a few years later as a backup.

David White, a longtime volunteer at Strathcona, tells me about the machine as hot water from the nearby community hall flows into the barrel through an industrial-strength garden hose, causing steam to rise into the night. “You need a good boiler,” White notes. As we chat, out on the ice Roy Kuyhnlein is working shovels with a few helpful teenagers. White and Kuyhnlein are part of a roster of volunteers who maintain the ice here, most of whom came together five years ago when the rink was at risk of closing after the work proved too much for a longtime volunteer to handle on his own. Today, it’s a bustling spot, with a

hockey and a pleasure-skating rink, and the twin DIY ice-resurfacing inventions are central to the operation. “I love it on the weekends here,” Kuyhnlein says. “There are so many people of all kinds. It’s like the Canadian dream.”

Wearing hiking boots and a thin tuque, White slowly pulls the machine in a pattern across the ice, leaving gleaming trails of quickly freezing water behind (unlike most amateur hockey fans transfixed by the circling of a Zamboni between periods, when White missed a spot I stifled the urge to boo). When completed, he left behind a thing of beauty, crystal-smooth and as reflective as a mirror. “I find it a little fun,” he says. A snowfall forecast for later that evening seemed a cosmic calamity. But such is the Sisyphean task of ice makers.

Homemade Zambonis are as varied as the rinks they maintain. They come big and small, cobbled together or built professionally (or nearly professionally), some pulled by hand, others towed by tractors. The Internet is full of advice. You can even order online an outdoor ice-resurfacing machine called a Bambini (a baby Zamboni, get it?), but most of these seem to end up with some serious modifications sooner or later. Carpet runners of the kind you purchase by the foot at Canadian Tire are the go-to replacement squeegee, for example. For some ice makers, this kind of tinkering seems to be half the attraction of the job. Tool sheds or drafty garages that house DIY Zambonis tend to evolve into winter man caves, resplendent with defaced Toronto Maple Leaf paraphernalia, half-empty beer fridges and ideas that are forever on the cusp of completion.

You could spend hours talking about these DIY Zambonis (I know because I have), but it wasn’t the machines that struck me, it was the people. The ice makers take a craftsman’s approach to their work, and their ingenuity and passion can be staggering. One even told me he takes holidays from work when the first cold snap hits to ensure the ice has a good foundation. The ice makers are honing a true Canadian artisanal skill, like winemaking for the French or clock-making for the Swiss. They know that stray blades of grass attract melting sunlight, so snowbanks around the rink should be piled high. They know the perfect outside temperature at which to flood. They all figured out the precise distance necessary between drill holes in plastic piping to deliver a steady stream of water. It’s not a job for most of these ice makers. It’s a calling.

But when the conversation turns to the big question of why, the answers don’t come as freely. Why spend all this time in the cold and dark? Why give so much free time for mostly strangers? Why clean up after some moron too lazy to pack out his empties after a night of boozy shinny? They can answer any question you have about building ice, but most struggle a bit to answer why. Everyone I spoke to said they got started making ice when their kids were young and looking for a decent place to skate. But some of those kids are grown and gone, while the ice makers return every winter. So what is it?

They like helping out. They like building community. They like seeing kids enjoy the ice.

Perhaps what they like most of all can be found in that moment on New Year’s Eve, when their ice is bustling with families beneath the lights, the hot chocolate is flowing and a normally surly teenager floats a soft pass to a six-year-old he just met and everybody feints being deked out of their shorts so the kid can slide one past a grownup between the pipes and everybody cheers. Maybe it’s not such a tough question after all.

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